What I suggest is to allow player turning metal into others via cells/Nuclear Reactor.
For exemple, Iridium is very close to Gold in the Periodic Chart.
So you could easily turn Iridium ore into Gold. But that would be useless, and the process could be inverted, but it would be harder to do.
The base of the system: To add mass to the Isotope, place it next to or between ura-cells.
After that, you would have others Type of Isotope (which wouldn't emit He nucleus but proto or others particle.
And when combining a lot of radioactive emitters, you could add(or take if you want to reduce the Isotope mass, for exemple in order to produce Iridium ore from gold) a certain amounts of mass, allowing you to create Copper from Iron, Coal from sand (very hard, you would need to share its in 2 parts, then to make it emit 1 He nucleus) ...
I do not suggest any "recipes", I just suggest the system (that was example)
, and would be the Isotope you would use to turn into what you want.
And of course, all this recipes would be secret ... so you would spend to find it as many time as for crossbreeding
Types of emitters: Gamma/Alpha/Beta+/Beta-
Of course it would need to be balanced. Turning Gold Into Iridium with a simple mean would be OP.
PS:
To link with one of my threads: Glowdust Cells/Redstone Dust Cells could be some emiters